Maker-Client Communication

3 Things I Wish Developers Understood About Communicating with Clients

Before joining Atomic Object as a Delivery Lead, I spent over a decade in software product management. I worked for a small non-profit that relied heavily on contracts with outside consultants for software design and engineering services. One of my primary responsibilities was to manage these partners through the discovery, design, and implementation phases. I […]

Three Steps to Setting Expectations in Software Development

If there’s one thing that can help guarantee the success of a software project, it’s ensuring that everyone’s expectations about the project are aligned. It’s very important to set expectations about what features a project will have, what platforms it’s supposed to run on, when it’s going to be delivered, and how much it’s going […]

Consulting Under Pressure

Every developer has had late nights of debugging seemingly impossible problems. And every consultant has been through crucial conversations explaining their reasoning for tough decisions. Those of us who are software developers and consultants get all the highs and lows of both. High-pressure consulting situations can be tricky to navigate in the heat of the […]

Bringing the Customer Along Is Worth It

As a Delivery Lead at Atomic, I sit between the client and the product team and one of my responsibilities is to enhance the client’s experience. What does that really mean? It varies depending on the makeup of the client team and the objectives for their project. However, a common element of any client enhancement […]

Three Ways to Make Your Client’s Life Easier

Taking care of your clients is, as everyone knows, vital for a service-based organization. You were hired to do a job for one or both of these reasons: The client doesn’t have the expertise to do it. The client doesn’t have the time to do it. Reason 1 requires some targeted education and consulting from […]

How to Apply Control Engineering Theory to Your Relationships

Managing a long-term client relationship, or any relationship for that matter, takes work. You have two organizations, each with its own business goals, attempting to interact with one another through two or more people. Those people also each have their own personal goals and their own way of interpreting and applying all of these goals […]

How Teaching Board Games Makes Me a Better Consultant

For the past two years, I’ve attended a little-known convention called Gen Con. Okay, depending on who you ask, it might not be that little-known. It draws over 60,000 unique attendees (over 200k visits throughout four days). Besides spending time enjoying everything at the convention—from visiting exhibitor booths to making purchases, trying out new games, […]